As I have mentioned before, we are having our timber flooring done post handover. Our flooring company have been great to deal with and have been very understanding and accommodating with our difficulty of locking in a date. We have had to move and change the dates 4 times so far. We now have it locked in again in three and a half weeks. Our SS was so confident it would be fine for the dates (and some of those dates have passed us already - by weeks!). I'm feeling very nervous about it now as we have just under 4 weeks until we have to be out of our rental property. That means the house needs to be done and the flooring finished in that time..... It's not going to happen! Looks like we will have to put everything in storage for a few weeks - what a pain!!!!!! Anyway, we also found out something with the flooring that we didn't know or hadn't anticipated;
The flooring will be laid and take approximately 3 to 4 days to lay.
As the flooring is Queensland Spotted Gum and the temperature and humidity levels are very different here in Victoria - the timber will then have humidity testing over approximately 3 weeks and when they are happy with the results it will then be sanded and polished. This process takes approximately 3 days and after those 3 days we will not be able to go into the house for 48 hours minimum. Which means - for about a month we wont really be able to set our furniture up on the flooring (or we will but then have to dismantle everything). We will also have to be out of the house basically for the week! It's going to be worth the wait but getting the house set out perfectly (as everyone wants when they first move in) is going to take a little longer than the first weekend!!!
Hi, I really enjoyed reading your blog and was just wondering if I can pick your brains on a few thing.... We are building a Carlisle home (haven't signed the tender yet) and we also are looking at installing spotted gum floors.
ReplyDeleteWhat did you do with your skirting boards, did you have them fitted or not, by Carlisle?
Also did you have your staircase stained or will you match this with the flooring?
Who are you using to do your flooring?
Do you remember how much Carlisle deduct for the flooring?
Thanks
Christine
Hi Christine, happy to help! What home are you thinking of building? So many choices!! We put in our contracts to leave the skirting boards off. When you do this you cannot specify which areas, we had to leave the skirting boards off to all of the lower ground floor - which is a bit of a pain - but def worth is as well! The skirting are left off, uncut and unpainted. I turned up at the house one day and they were all on! They said we could leave them on and get the floorers to pull them off but didn't want to risk leaving the walls damaged and no doubt damage to some skirting. They pulled them off for us (we got to keep the bedroom on though which will be carpeted (and has doors). Any rooms without doors had to come off too as the height of the timber floors will change the skirt height. Our site supervisor has left us two full packs of skirts and will also leave the paint - once the painters have finished. We have arrange for our floorers to put the skirting boards on to all the floors - for a charge. Choosing the stair colour was really hard as nothing is perfectly matched to spotted gum. We chose 'Walnut' stain as we felt this was the closest. The good thing with spotted gum is that it has great variation. We matched our front door and stair stain to keep those consistent. We are using a local flooring company on the Bellarine Peninsula (happy to share if you are in the area). We were part of the 'Celebrating 10 Years' package which included flooring to all areas - Our contact = 'Delete floor covering to entry, hallway, kitchen, pantry, family and meals - $4840. Doesn't cover the cost but it was a great deduction! Some advice when looking for company's to install timber flooring is to try and avoid those that use quad. We tried to get the flooring put down before the kitchen was installed - but Carlisle do not allow this - not even if we signed a waiver. Therefore our timber company need to use corking around the benches in the kitchen (this is just a silicone to allow for expansion). They can either do this or quad - some companies only do quad so it is worth shopping around. Hope this helps!
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